Chuck > Recent Status Updates

Ws that unity of effort, that common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? …We could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how much work I had left to do.

The day after…my daily batch of 10 constituent letters contained [one] from a young woman…who’d been four years old at the time of the attacks…her dad had been in one of the Twin Towers when it fell and had called to speak to her before it collapsed… Although nothing could change the fact of his absence, she wanted me and [everyone involved]…to know how much it meant that America hadn’t forgotten him.

[Trump] was a spectacle, and in the USA in 2011, that was a form of power. Trump trafficked in a currency that, however shallow, seemed to gain more purchase with each passing day… far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he’d peddled, he in fact had never been bigger.

As the students and their parents cheered, many of them waving American flags…I thought about the country I’d just described to them- a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an American that was open to everyone… For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.

I was once again reminded that so much of what really mattered in government came down to the daily, unheralded acts of people who weren’t seeking attention but simply knew what they were doing and did it with pride.

Trump understood instinctively what moved the conservative base most, and be offered it up in an unadulterated form… I knew that the passions he was tapping, the dark, alternative vision he was promoting and legitimizing, we’re something I’d likely be contending with for the remainder of my presidency.

[Trump] had figured out that whatever guardrails had once defined the boundaries of acceptable political discourse has long since been knocked down. In that sense there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They too understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true. The only difference… was Trumps lack of inhibition.

More and more, I’d noticed how the mood we’d first witnessed in the fading days of Sarah Palin…had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center- an emotional, almost visceral reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.

Some of the same Republicans who had demanded that I intervene in Libya had decided that they were now against it… [they] seemed unembarrassed by the inconsistency. Effectively, they were putting me on notice that even issues of war and peace, life and death, were now part of a grim, unrelenting partisan game.

My time had been absorbed by just trying to keep the circumstances of the poor…from worsening: making sure a global recession didn’t drastically drive up heir ranks or eliminate whatever slipper foothold they might have in the labor market; trying to head off a change in climate… or in the case of Libya, trying to prevent a madman’s army from gunning people down in the streets.

I knew whatever impact my fleeting presence might have had…it couldn’t compensate for the grinding poverty they endured every day; the bad schools, polluted air, poisoned water, and sheer disorder that many of them had to wade through just to survive. By my own estimation, my impact on the lives of poor children and their families so far had been negligible.

As much as I shared the impulse to save innocent people from tyrants, I was profoundly wary of ordering any kind of military action against Libya… the truth is that war is never tidy and always results in unintended consequences, even when launched against seemingly powerless countries on behalf of a righteous cause.

This was precisely the scenario [we] had sought to avoid: the US government suddenly caught between a repressive but reliable ally and a population insistent on change, voicing the democratic aspirations we claimed to stand for.

US interests in stability across the Middle East and North Africa were adversely affected by the United States uncritical support of authoritarian regimes.

In the months to come, I’d often think back to [that] dinner… to insist that the old order in the Middle East would indefinitely hold, to believe that the children of despair wouldn’t revolt, at some point, against those who maintained it- that, it turned out, was the greatest illusion of all.

…designed to package the latest US president who thought things could change. I imagined them shaking hands afterward, like actors taking off their costumes and makeup backstage, before returning to the world they knew…because deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible. A world without illusions- that’s what they’d call it.

We spoke of the costs of endless conflict, the fathers who never came home, the mothers who buried their children. To an outsider, it would have seemed a hopeful moment, the start of something new. And yet later that night…I couldn’t help feeling a vague sense of disquiet…-“” felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance that each of the four leaders had probably participated in dozens of times…

Just about every country in the world considered Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian Territories to be a violation of international law. [We found ourselves] in the awkward position of having to defend Israel for actions that we ourselves opposed. U.S. officials also had to explain why it wasn’t hypocritical for us to press countries like China or Iran on their human rights records…

In six weeks, the House and Senate had together clocked a remarkable 48 days in session and enacted 99 laws- more than a quarter of the 111th Congress’s total legislation over two years.., what more might we have accomplished, I wondered, and how much further along would the economic recovery be, had this sort of atmosphere prevailed from the start of my term?

[Dreamers] were smart, poised, and resilient- as full of potential as my own daughters. I’d anything, I found the Dreamers to be less cynical about America than many of their native-born contemporaries- precisely because their circumstances had taught them not to take life in this country for granted.